“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see” – Mark Twain.

Dear Climate Healers,

Here is the full text of the speech I delivered during The Vegan Community event on Saturday:

“Namaste Everyone!

We find ourselves at an extraordinary juncture in human history. On one side, we hold within us the power to heal, regenerate, and transform, to co-create a just, compassionate, and sustainable future. On the other, we are facing unprecedented ecological and social crises: biodiversity collapse, chemical pollution, climate breakdown, chronic diseases, world hunger and widespread injustice.

But the path forward is obscured by polarization around climate change that has fractured communities, strained families, and paralyzed political systems. And in the midst of this polarization lies one of the most powerful solutions: Veganism.

Today, I want to speak about how we can heal polarization on climate change and make Vegan advocacy more effective. Because at its heart, Veganism is not just a personal lifestyle. It is the foundation of a systems solution. It is a spiritual and cultural transformation. And most importantly, it is a bridge; a bridge that can unite diverse communities in the shared work of healing our planet.

Polarization is not just disagreement. Disagreement can be healthy, a catalyst for creativity and growth. Polarization, however, is when disagreement hardens into distrust, when identity becomes entangled with ideology, and when people stop listening to one another.

On climate change, polarization has taken many forms:

Some see climate change as an urgent existential threat, demanding immediate systemic action.

Others see it as exaggerated or even fabricated, a distraction from other priorities.

And many, caught in the middle, feel overwhelmed, helpless, or disengaged.

As Vegan advocates, we must recognize that our message can unintentionally deepen these social divides. As Vegans, we know that we were misled on the protein myth and the calcium myth. Naturally, we are now inclined to question the official narratives on everything. While this questioning is healthy, it can also lead us down rabbit holes.

If it leads us to see corruption everywhere, we risk reinforcing resistance. If people feel judged, they stop listening to our advocacy. If they feel attacked, they entrench further.

So the first step in effective Vegan advocacy is humility. It is listening before speaking, connecting before convincing.

The Vegan movement embodies love and love comes with the freedom to choose. In this movement, everyone has the right to seek the truth in their own way, while respecting the rights of others to do the same.

In that context, I wish to thank The Vegan Community, Dr. Will Tuttle and Clare Mann for facilitating this dialogue. A dialogue is not a debate. In a debate, each side aims to win. In a dialogue, each side aims to reach a greater understanding of our shared reality.

Today, I will share with you my understanding of reality and be open to changing this understanding as the dialogue progresses.

Given the state of the world, most of us would agree with Dr. Faraz Harsini that Veganism is a moral urgency. I will now make my case that a Vegan World is an ethical urgency and the impact of animal agriculture on climate change is an invaluable tool for Vegan advocates to motivate global collective action on this urgency.

In this time of profound crises, each year, over 9 million people die of hunger. That’s like dropping a Hiroshima bomb on our human family every week. Add to that the 30 million lives claimed by chronic, preventable diseases. That is three more bombs every week. But beneath these tragedies lies a deeper wound: every six seconds, we detonate the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb on the animal kingdom. 100,000 bombs a week. Lives extinguished in factory farms, trawlers, and slaughterhouses, all to satisfy appetites we were conditioned to believe are normal, natural and necessary.

But what if we could stop this carnage? What if we could dismantle this machinery of suffering and build a world rooted in reverence for life? That is not just change. That is transformation.

As Tracey Martin said, “Change is inevitable. But transformation is intentional.”

We are living through an extraordinary moment, the tipping point between two distinct worlds. One world, which I call Planet A, is the world we inherited. It is built on domination, deception, and denial.

In Planet A, exploitation is the name of the game. Animals are exploited, the earth is exploited and humans are exploited, all for profit.

In Planet A, we clear-cut forests for grazing, vacuum life from oceans, and normalize the separation of mothers from their babies in the name of food. It is a world where infinite growth is demanded on a finite planet. It is a world that is unraveling.

In Planet A, official narratives highlight shaded versions of reality that make the most money for a few.

Official narratives highlight that protein is found in meat. They shade the truth that protein is also found in all plant foods, and indeed all plant foods have all amino acids and have complete protein.

Official narratives highlight that calcium is found in milk. They shade the truth that if we eat enough calories on a natural Vegan diet, we will get enough calcium.

Official narratives highlight that our Earth is experiencing a climate crisis. They shade the truth that the climate crisis is just the fever, a symptom of a larger ecological breakdown caused by our human engineered systems organized around growth as the master objective and consumption and commodification as social logic.

Official narratives highlight that fossil fuels are the cause of climate change. They shade the truth that animal agriculture is the leading cause of biodiversity loss, ecosystems collapse, fresh water depletion and yes, even climate change.

But here’s the larger reality: There IS a Planet B.

Planet B is the world we are called to create, a world where cages are empty, forests are sacred, and food is grown in harmony with Nature. In Planet B, life is celebrated, not commodified. Compassion is currency. And all beings, human and nonhuman, are treated with dignity.

Planet B is not a fantasy. It is not distant. It is already emerging. It is in regenerative farms, in sanctuaries, in community gardens, in plant-based kitchens, in policy circles, and in the hearts of people like you.

The journey from Planet A to Planet B is the defining movement of our time.

This is not a time to reform the old systems. This is a time to hospice what must die and midwife what must be born.

It is a time to build bridges, for farmers, workers, and communities to cross from harm to healing. It is a time to imagine boldly, act courageously, and love fiercely. And it all begins with one powerful step:

Go Vegan.

Go Vegan, not just in our diets, but as a declaration of independence from violence, as a recommitment to life, as an act of radical love. Go VEGAN as in Vitally Engaged Guardian of Animals and Nature.

We are not here to wait for governments or corporations to lead. We are here to lead, by embodying the values we wish to see in the world.

I am a systems engineer by training. I helped design digital protocols that made the Internet ten times faster. Systems are what I do. And I say this with the utmost conviction:

Going Vegan is the single most important first step we can take to heal our planet’s life support systems.

We debated this at the Oxford Union, one of the oldest and most prestigious debating societies in the world. We won. What emerged was the Oxford Consensus: the world must transition to a Vegan way of life, as soon as possible.

Why? Because the Vegan World of Planet B addresses not one or two, but all of the planetary boundaries we are currently transgressing.

The Planetary Health Check Report of 2025 warns that we’ve breached seven out of nine planetary boundaries and climate change is only the fourth worst breach. Any one of these breaches can lead to irreversible ecological collapse. But when we Go Vegan, we begin to heal all of them.

Let’s look at the facts:

Animal agriculture uses 37% of the Earth’s ice-free land just for grazing. It razes forests, replacing vibrant ecosystems with monocultures of grass. It extracts more biomass from the earth for animal feed than the biomass extracted for all other human activities combined.

Over the past 10,000 years, humans have cut down half the planet’s trees, from 6 trillion to 3 trillion, largely for animal farming. Restoring those trees and rejuvenating the soil beneath them is our greatest opportunity to draw down carbon and heal the climate.

Meanwhile, the oceans are being stripped bare. Industrial fishing involves bottom-trawling an area the size of South America every single year. Marine ecosystems are collapsing, and with them, the lungs of our planet.

What about freshwater? Animal agriculture is the single largest user of fresh water globally. The water used to produce a single pound of beef could provide drinking water for a person for three years.

And emissions? We mostly hear about fossil fuels. But animal agriculture is responsible for at least 87% of annual greenhouse gas emissions, when we consider its full lifecycle impact and include the carbon opportunity cost of the land used for animal agriculture, as any competent systems engineer would.

So, what happens when we Go Vegan?

We restore forests and draw down hundreds of gigatons of carbon.

We replenish aquifers and free up land for rewilding.

We reduce emissions drastically and immediately.

We end the suffering of trillions of animals.

We prevent pandemics by removing zoonotic disease reservoirs.

We feed the hungry, because plant-based agriculture is vastly more efficient.

This is not ideology. This is common sense. This is systems thinking. This is science.

In his talks, Dr. Tuttle raises some questions about mainstream climate science. With respect, I want to clarify these points in the spirit of truth and understanding:

He states that CO₂ changes followed temperature in the ice core record. It is true that in the ancient ice core record, CO₂ often lagged behind temperature changes by several hundred years. But this does not mean CO₂ is irrelevant. What it shows is that initial warming events, triggered by changes in Earth’s orbit and tilt known as the Milankovitch cycles, released CO₂ from oceans. That extra CO₂ then amplified the warming through the greenhouse effect. In other words, CO₂ was not the spark, but it was the fuel that turned small changes into major climate shifts. Today, we are lighting the fire ourselves by directly adding CO₂ at unprecedented rates.

He states that CO₂ is plant food, not a greenhouse gas. It is true that plants need CO₂ to grow. But CO₂ is also, without question, a greenhouse gas. This is basic physics first demonstrated in the 19th century by John Tyndall and later quantified by Svante Arrhenius. The infrared radiation emitted by the Earth, as measured by satellites, has a distinct notch characteristic of the radiation profile of CO₂, as measured in laboratories. This makes it clear that more CO₂ traps more heat. Plants cannot absorb the vast excess we are emitting. Forests are being destroyed for animal agriculture, and oceans, which once absorbed much of our CO₂, are acidifying and losing capacity. Extra CO₂ may help plants grow in the short term, but it also fuels heatwaves, droughts, floods, and wildfires that devastate plant life in the long term.

He states CO₂ levels were much higher in the distant past. Indeed, hundreds of millions of years ago, CO₂ levels were much higher. But the context matters. The Sun was dimmer then, ecosystems were radically different, tectonic plates were configured differently, and humans did not exist. Our entire civilization, our food systems, our shelter systems, our water systems, developed during the stable climate of the Holocene, when CO₂ levels were around 280 parts per million. Today, we have exceeded 425 ppm, a level not seen in millions of years. The problem is not that CO₂ was once higher; it is that our civilization depends on the stable climate we are now destabilizing, while life on Earth is visibly unable to adapt to the rate at which we are destabilizing it.

He asserts that climate models are useless. Indeed, all climate models are an approximation of reality, but that doesn’t mean they are useless. In Nature, every leaf, every rock, every grain of sand is unique. Models attempt to capture aggregate behavior in Nature and they have been successfully used to predict and design the world that we live in. The UN IPCC compiles results from a range of climate models. All climate models are calibrated with historical and measured data from earth observatories and then used to predict future climate trends.

Climate models are characterized by their CO2 doubling sensitivities, which is the increase in the equilibrium surface temperature of the Earth if its atmospheric CO2 concentration is doubled, while holding all other parameters constant. The average IPCC climate model uses 3.0°C as the CO2 doubling sensitivity. When Dr. Tuttle states that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas, he is arguing for 0°C as the CO2 doubling sensitivity, but there is no such model that has been calibrated with historical and measured data from Earth observatories. In contrast, Dr. Jim Hansen and his colleagues have made a credible case that the CO2 doubling sensitivity of the Earth is actually around 4.5°C in order to explain anomalies in the measurement data for 2023 and 2024.

In summary, the science is persuasive. CO₂ is both a plant nutrient and a powerful greenhouse gas. Besides, CO2 is just one among a dozen human-caused emissions and factors that impact the Earth’s climate. And humans are destabilizing the Earth’s climate now, in ways that are undeniable and dangerous.

But beyond the science, there is a deeper truth.

Veganism is the acknowledgment that our ancestors were right when they declared, “Ahimsa Paramo Dharma” — nonviolence is the highest moral law.

It is a return to the heart. A recognition that we are not separate from Nature. Indeed, we are Nature. That our fates are intertwined with the fates of all living beings.

As I share in The Pinky Promise, it was my granddaughter who brought this home to me. Holding her in my arms, I made a vow, a pinky promise, to do everything in my power to leave her a livable planet. That promise lives in my every breath. That promise is what drives me.

We need not be perfect to be powerful. We simply need to act from love. And love, when expressed through our food, our choices, our voices, and our votes, becomes unstoppable.

This is the essence of what Judy Carman calls, “Homo Ahimsa,” the compassionate caretaker species we are destined to become.

We are not here to dominate Nature. We are here to dance with Nature.

We are not here to just consume until we die. We are here to conserve, connect, and co-create while we live.

We are the butterflies, emerging from the caterpillar phase of our civilization. As I wrote in Carbon Dharma and Carbon Yoga, this is our metamorphosis. A Vegan metamorphosis.

So today, I invite you, to live your values. To tell a new story. To walk the path of Planet B.

Let us germinate the seeds of compassion in every heart. Let us cultivate courage in every community. Let us regenerate the Earth with every step.

Together, we can transform hunger into health. We can transform conflict into communion. We can transform this crisis into a celebration of life.

This is the greatest transformation in human history.

And it begins with your plate, your voice, your love.

Go Vegan. Live Ahimsa. Create Planet B.

Thank you!”

Join us at V-COP23

Please join us in Toronto for the Vegan Convergence Of the Peoples #23 (V-COP23) on Nov 1-2 to help shape and implement our system design plan for Planet B. The theme for V-COP23 is offered by our co-host, Plant Based Treaty: Redirect, Relinquish, Restore::

Redirect our focus from fixing Planet A to building Planet B.
Relinquish the excess resources we have taken from the planet.
Restore the life-support systems of the planet with the relinquished resources.

Please be there and help make history.

With much love,